Related Links: Bloomberg article | Ozone hoax video Asthma blast calc: Blasts per mile pf private jet travel = Private jet emissions of 41 pounds per mile (1,124,539 pounds of emissions/27,146 miles/) divided by 0.022 pounds per blast = 1,836 blasts per mile
via JunkScience.com
October 9, 2024 at 01:59AM
"It is debatable whether we need home-grown electricity more desperately than home-grown food these days: reliance on imports of both are increasing sharply. But you cannot currently make bread or lambs any other way than by using land; the same is not true of electricity." Read the full article here:
Solar farms are taking us back to the dark ages – Matt Ridley
via climate science
October 9, 2024 at 01:58AM
New Yorkers are paying a huge price of offshore wind power, which is 4 times the cost of their conventional supplies from gas and nuclear.
So much for all that loose talk about wind power being cheap, clean and green.
As Willis Eschenbach points out below, for an industry that brags about cost, wind power is magnitudes more expensive than everything else around.
Why Is Cheap Wind Power So Expensive?
Watts Up With That?
Willis Eschenbach
28 August 2024
Back on March 29, 2021, the Biden White House took on the following goals:’
Hmmm, sez I, seems a mite ambitious. Current US grid-connected offshore wind is a mere 0.17 gigawatts … so we’d need to do ~ 175 times as much as we’ve done to date and do it in a short six years.
So I divided it out. There are 65 months until 2030. Thirty gigawatts is thirty thousand megawatts, less the 174 megawatts in place, that’s 29,826 megawatts more total generating capacity needed.
29,826 megawatts divided by 65 months means we’d have to add offshore wind generation to the tune of 465 additional megawatts of generation capacity per month. Every month. Starting now.
Get real. That’s not remotely possible. The biggest US offshore windfarm just came on line, 132 MW capacity. To reach the White House goal, every month we’d need to build three new windfarms of that size. No way that can happen. It’s just numbers picked out of the air to gain popular support.
Next, I researched the length of time it takes to get an offshore wind farm online. Here’s what ChatGPT sez:
The time from the proposal of an offshore wind farm to its grid connection typically ranges from 7 to 10 years. This timeline can be broken down into several phases:
Pre-development and Planning (1-2 years): This phase involves site identification, feasibility studies, and initial environmental assessments.
Permitting and Approvals (3-5 years): Securing the necessary permits and approvals is often the most time-consuming part of the process. This includes detailed environmental impact assessments, consultations with stakeholders, and obtaining state and federal permits.
Construction (2-3 years): Once all approvals are secured, construction of the wind farm, including the installation of turbines and subsea cables, takes place. This phase also includes the grid connection process.
Commissioning and Testing (several months): After construction, the turbines are tested, and the wind farm is gradually brought online.
Seems unreasonable but likely factual. So what that means is that unless a project is well underway right now, it won’t be online until after 2030.
Under the Biden Administration, there have been nine offshore wind projects approved. These propose building a total of 13 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity. However, only two of these projects are actually under construction or completed —Vineyard Wind, located off the coast of Massachusetts, and South Fork Wind, located near the coasts of Rhode Island and New York.
South Fork Wind just came online. This gives us a chance to look at some actual cost figures. It’s the biggest wind farm to date, a 132-megawatt addition to offshore wind. It cost $637 million.
(Note that to reach the 30 GW goal, we’d need no less than 225 wind farms of this size … but I digress)
However, Federal subsidies added $191 million to that, plus another couple of hundred million or so from Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
Stop and consider. Some private company is building a six-hundred-million-dollar white elephant in the middle of the ocean, and it’s getting paid four hundred million of taxpayer money to do so.
So … what does the New York consumer get for all of this more than generous support?
The consumer gets wind power costing FOUR TIMES AS MUCH as the current cost of power in New York.
Stop and consider. Even when the developer gets two-thirds of the cost paid by the taxpayer, offshore wind power is still four times as expensive.
And of course, that doesn’t even touch the cost of maintaining backup power for the times when there’s no wind … the cartoonist Josh sees that clearly.
via STOP THESE THINGS
October 9, 2024 at 01:30AM
“Mitigation has had far more attention than adaptation…. So thanks to various people who alerted me to a new guide to the often-ignored subject of adaptation….” (- David Shukman, below)
The failure of climate mitigation policy grows ever more obvious. It was 36 years ago (1988) that the debate began on the front pages of the New York Times and other leading newspapers, and look where we are now. A tripartite fossil fuel boom … grassroot backlash against wind and solar installations … growing federal budget deficits with Green Energy bribes … and a significant divide in regard to nuclear and geoengineering as ‘climate fixers’.
If the crisis is upon us, then the ‘climate dollar’ must go toward resilience and adaptation (R&A), not mitigation that has no effect on global climate for decades. David Shukman, BBC News Science Editor turned “Independent Consultant/Storytelling Expert,” recently posted:
A good friend once said our bodies can travel by jet but our souls have to walk.
I felt something similar with the contradictions of Climate Week in New York – finding positives amid the traffic fumes and hot air. With the Amazon burning and northern Nigeria underwater, immediate dangers are getting more attention, as they should, giving the week’s insipid slogan “It’s Time” some meaning.
And dealing with those dangers is now edging into the mainstream, at last. It’s a good sign that Boston Consulting Group (BCG), spotting a commercial opportunity, could rustle up a dozen speakers to talk about adaptation. Or is it resilience? Or ‘A and R’? Actually who cares, I thought, gazing out from the 45th floor, as long as new investments save lives in future fires and floods.
One problem is that “prevention doesn’t have a business case” – credit to Dr. Ashwin Vasan for that memorable line, at a Reckitt Bupa roundtable on healthy cities at the Goals House.
Shukman continued:
You might think it would be screamingly obvious to use less fossil fuel not only to slow the rise in temperatures but also to reduce air pollution to cut asthma cases to lighten the burden on hospitals, a beneficial chain reaction. Apparently not, though the case is gaining ground.
As with the two billion people whose health and productivity would be immeasurably improved by access to clean water, a scandal that’s “unforgivable” according to – name drop – Matt Damon, co-founder of Water.org which enables millions to get micro-loans to fund new water connections.
Hearing this master storyteller, it occurred to me that specifics like water supply – at risk from higher temperatures and increasing drought – are the best way to describe the effects of climate change….
Before I left, I spent a few hours in Queens, an often forgotten side of New York that has a view of the Manhattan skyscrapers but feels like another planet. Yoselin Genao Estrella introduced me to victims of flooding. Rain was forecast, making everyone edgy, because the heaviest downpours fill their basement apartments with sewage and threaten lives.
This is where the acronym ‘A and R’ really matters, because getting it right will make people safer in a climate that’s becoming more hostile. Much more to follow.
In the comments, Shukman added:
… waking up to the realities of our new climate. So thanks to various people who alerted me to a new guide to the often-ignored subject of adaptation….
And: “Mitigation has had far more attention than adaptation.”
One reader asked:
So did all of the hashtag#climateweek high-flyers come up with the simple great idea of (deeds not words*) stopping flying to climate conferences, here on in? Pledging hashtag#flightfree
I hope so. Been waiting decades for you to come up with that one. You know, ‘being the change’ ‘walking the talk’ ‘leading from the front’ ‘teaching by example’ And acting as if the truth is real. ‘Flying to climate conferences’ was a sick joke 30 years ago. A good idea like this could go a long way. And save our souls.
Shukman (meekly) responded:
Totally fair point. I’m sure everyone there, like me, believed that somehow their presence was making a difference whether through a well-timed nudge or a revealing insight or providing something useful for others to take back to their bosses and help make a case for change. For each of us, there’s the unavoidable fact that others, like you, will judge us which is never comfortable and which rightly forces some serious self-scrutiny.
I commented:
Resilience and adaptation have been at the core of the free market, wealth-is-health ‘climate policy’ since the beginning. Substitute ‘weather’ for ‘climate’, and this is the argument for the beginning of humankind.
“Climate livability”
“The popular climate discussion … looks at man as a destructive force for climate livability … because we use fossil fuels. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe. High-energy civilization, not climate, is the driver of climate livability.” – Alex Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, pp. 126–127.
Final Comment
Climate mitigation policy is at war with itself. Extreme weather from whatever cause, natural or anthropogenic, calls for immediate relief–and resilience/adaptation for next time. Mitigation policies are a crap shoot and decades out versus the present. Many birds loose in the bush versus one in the hand, so to speak.
And with resilience/adaptation increasingly chosen, the ‘negative externality’ of manmade greenhouse gas emissions is increasingly internalized by anyone’s math. Added to the saturation effect ((diminishing returns)) of CO2 forcing, it is increasingly game-over for the climate activists. May free-market wealth-is-health policies win.
My exchange with David Shukman went further.
Shukman: “Rob, you’re right that mitigation hasn’t cut emissions so far but the effort has been hampered in so small way by the denial, distraction and doubt whipped by fossil fuel interests, you’d have to agree. Now, however, cost reductions for renewables are starting to change that picture. And on the question of living space, when did you last visit an oil field or open cast coal mine?!
Bradley: ” … the effort has been hampered in so small way by the denial, distraction and doubt whipped by fossil fuel interests…”
Far too simple and conspiratorial. Billions of consumers have strong preferences for the best energies–those that are the most affordable, available, and reliable. Those are the stock energies from the sun, not a very dilute flow that is intermittent.
Oil fields and coal mines produce very concentrated energies that are easily neutralized and covered up. Peter Huber made this point well (versus solar/wind sprawl):
“The greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material than must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt. [In contrast], extracting comparable amounts of energy from the surface would entail truly monstrous environmental disruption…. The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn’t, and so to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green.”
Hans van der Loo commented to both Shukman and me:
at this moment we (wrongly) believe capturing trickle flows of solar energy with metal intensive rebuildables, somehow can replace multi-million years of stored ancient solar energy. However, Physics does not agree with that notion.
The post “Resilience and Adaptation”: Mitigation Demotion Ahead? appeared first on Master Resource.
via Master Resource
October 9, 2024 at 01:10AM
